Does number of results in SERP dictate competitiveness of term?

[andrewrab]

Necessarily I should say?!?

In other words, if one key phrase (perhaps for one industry) has 76,000 results, and another (say for another industry) has 42,000 results... is the first one AUTOMATICALLY more competitive?

Or, could the first one have more results, yet overall, fewer optimized results?

In other words, something like viagra with 4,000,000 and something else with only 10,000... (granted, bad example)... but couldn't it be possible for the 10,000 result one to have super, ultra-optimized results, and hence, be more competitive?

Maybe competitive is the wrong term... maybe I should say DIFFICULT...

Thoughts?

[Chris_R]

no - especially with phrases:

dog cat gives:

2.2 Million

while

online casinos gives:

1.3 million

"online casinos"
708,000

"dog cat"
240,000

allinurl: "dog-cat"
1430

allinurl: "online-casinos"
80500

Online casinos is not twice as hard - or even three times as "competitive"

I would say 80 times is more likely is a good start.

There are more things similar you can do for this. However - they are top secret and I can't reveal them under penalty of death.

[andrewrab]

Hmmm... you know... all of I sudden I feel like a real idiot!

Duh.

DO you -- or anyone -- have any particularly useful or relevant 'non-penalty-of-death-type' advice about analyzing the competitiveness of multiple industries? ... Or, should I say, is there anything more graceful than what we do now, which is GO AND LOOK at all the SERPS, the results, their PR, and their backlinks?

Thanks anyway!

[4eyes]

Its often useful to look elsewhere for the 'signs'

eg - What are the Overture bids

The really comeptitive phrases will show large maximum bids

[tedster]

You can also tell a lot by looking at the top of the SERP for the signs of SEO - whatever they may be. If #5 isn't particularly well optimized or backlinked, then even if there are 5 million pages returned, the competition isn't very strong.

[Ankheg]

I assume you're already "in" a market or niche? If so, what I do is search for various terms that I think people might, possible, potentially use to find my sector. I know all the (well, alright, all the major) players in this field. Any time I find a search where there are completely irrelevant sites coming up in the top 10, I go and optimise, somewhat, for that term. It's worked pretty good so far...

I also optimise for some terms where the top 10 results are relevant, but don't represent the "big players"; I may just be a little player in this field, but, dangit, I sure as heck can rank higher than Bubba's Widgets, which is hosted on some banner-infested free host... You really don't need hardcore SEO skills to achieve that.

As far as number of results = competitiveness, no, not even close. I rank #1 for terms with 13,000 and 69,800 results; these are not competetive terms at all (the latter is a quite popular type of food, and not a brand name, either); I also rank #1 for a term with only 189 results, and #6 of 1,390, yet these are very competetive terms, albeit VERY niche. :)

[rfgdxm1]

As has been already said, look for what the bids are for the relevant keywords, and clear signs of SEO at the top. One thing that can be a killer is if it is a niche market, but yet the top tends to be heavily SEOed. People don't seem to dig down too far from the top when all the sites on top of a SERP are relevant.

[Powdork]

I agree with RFG. In my niche category the results are limited because there are only so many people offering the service. However, it is a relatively expensive service so the top 7 or 8 sites spend a decent amount of money getting to where they are. After that it drops off heavily. So basically some results where there are a lot of listings may be top heavy in their actual level of competitiveness.

[mil2k]

allintile:Keywords search actually helps. It shows the actual no of pages which have bothered to put a Keyword rich title. The total no of results for allintitle helps put things in perspective. But nothing is final. As said earlier competitiveness changes from category to category. HTH :)

[andrewrab]

As usual, the brains have spoken and provided some great information! Thank you very much...

mil2k... that's great... I'm going to try that!

[andrewrab]

Wow... that allintitle thing is very helpful!

As a test... I went and looked at 2 things... one a plain, not-so-hot medication, and the other PHENTERMINE... holy moly... you can really see it and this DOES seem to help over just typing phentermine in GOogle... the results are different and you can see page after page after page of obviously SEO'd stuff (then again, you can both ways!)...

BUt when looking at the other one, it was different and abo****ely DID help as compared to just searching in Google...

THanks!

[steveb]

Straying a little...

what exactly does allintitle do? I can't think of anything that it could be a measure of in terms of the rankings. Yes, very useful seeing how many sites have "widgets" in the title, but how does "widgets foo" rank higher for allintitle than "widgets bar"?

[andrewrab]

Hey... I know for me it just simply seems to have stuck the top, optimized ones right there for me to see, and I scroll down and see how many are optimized...

It may not even help 'that' much... BUT, I can say that when I did my "PHENTERMINE" vs. non-popular test (and this isn't even my industry) using the allintitle thing... the results for Phentermine quickly showed me a bunch of what were obviously highly optimized titles in the SERPS... whereas the non-popular one immediatley showed me plain, non-heavily optmized results that looked natural...

WHo knows, maybe it doesn't actualy help it all... but it's nifty!

[mil2k]

what exactly does allintitle do?

Ha Ha :) Yeah not much use for ranking purpose but helps a lot in research IMHO. I use :-

allintitle:Keywords

allintitle:"Keywords"

allintitle:Keywords keywords

allintitle:"Keywords" "Keywords"

Then the results I compare and check where the sites are in normal ranking. I also keep PR in mind. And when you do all this research alongwith link: in google and Alltheweb you have a fair idea of the amount of work that should go into your SEO campaign.

[gregh]

i think it just depends on the competitiveness of the sites in the term

a term like "SEO" or "Search Engine" is hard to get just because you have these experts aiming at such a highly competative term. However something like "Online Casino" has a lot of sites listed under it, but for the most part the owners of those sites no nothing about optimization. They just fork out tons of money into banner ads.

[Powdork]

Then the results I compare and check where the sites are in normal ranking. I also keep PR in mind. And when you do all this research alongwith link: in google and Alltheweb you have a fair idea of the amount of work that should go into your SEO campaign.

Seems like once you've done all that, for all the keywords for all the pages, you've pretty much done the work that goes into the seo campaign. You gotta bill for something.:)

[mil2k]

You gotta bill for something.

Yeah I do send that research work to clients. Don't know if they make any heads or tails out of it but reassures them that the SEO is doing Some work. It is a time consuming job but once I do it I get a very good idea in my Brain. And the SEO strategies flow naturally. ;)

[andrewrab]

Hey... with regards to online gambling, you're right... a particular industry we're working in now -- one would THINK -- would be ultra-competitive... but it's not... it's everyone doing PPC -- OR -- it's people using this company who all they do is build duplicate sites and tons of doorway pages...

... so that's refreshing to see... and I see it fairly often... which indicates that there's still a lot of 'open territory' out there with regards to heavy-duty optimization.